An imposing black mobo, teasing you with sweet promises of SLI...
As the slightly odd first part of this page (up there) might have given away, this is indeed an SLI-ready board. Plugged into this board is the NVIDIA 790i chipset, enabling the use of multiple NVIDIA cards at once, as well as supporting DDR3-2000, though only in two slots at a time.Speaking of slots, these are positioned just far enough away from the CPU socket that you can install large coolers, and high enough that you can install and remove the modules without moving the graphics card first. The actual CPU socket is unfortunately quite cramped, and our TRUE could only be installed with the fan pointing towards what would be the top of the case, as well as being a tight squeeze to install. Luckily the 24 and 8-pin power connectors are placed in easy-to-reach locations, and remain out of the way of airflow.Sliding down the right hand side of the mobo brings us to an IDE header, and a right-angled FDD header – this would have made much more sense if they were swapped around, as FDDs are few and far between. Four SATA ports are adjacent to the RAM slots, and a further two are right-angled just below the IDE – all are accessible when long graphics cards are installed. A small LED post screen is nestled in the bottom corner of the board as well, and allows you to troubleshoot booting problems, though doesn’t display anything interesting under normal use. Unless you find a glowing “FF” message entertaining that is!The front panel headers are in the very bottom right corner, as well as a serial port header (please, let this interface die already!), two USB headers and a Firewire header. Power and Reset buttons are also present, as well as a mobo-mounted speaker which is invaluable for cases that don’t include them – or even when you’re benching without a case. The audio header is in a good spot down the bottom left corner of the board.Moving upwards from here to the expansion slots, there are plenty of options. Possibly the most exciting one of these is the ability to run three dual-slot graphics cards in Triple SLI, as well as another card such as a TV tuner or hardware RAID card in the top 1x slot. Of course, we’d be tempted to call that overkill, but then again you wouldn’t be reading this if you were into ‘just enough’.Overclocking of this board was pretty damn solid, with performance increasing more or less linearly, hitting a max FSB of 466, giving us an effective 4.2GHz on our test rig. The BIOS is slightly convoluted when it comes to getting into the overclocking settings, but once there it is easy to use and quite comprehensive.The only down side to this board (apart from the lack of solid capacitors across it) is the price, though for the money you’ll be buying a solid DDR3-based board that can handle SLI – what more could you want?
Issue: 106 | November, 2009